Will to Prepare

The lessons of winning and losing a state championship in one day

The hardest part about coaching high school athletes is convincing them that they want to put in all that hard work with no real guarantee that they will win anything. My 2008 boys’ cross country team from Metairie, LA had worked all season to be the best team in Division 1A. So there I was at a crucial moment in a dry, stale hotel room in central Louisiana when I found myself searching my mental library of running literature for the appropriate quote to inspire my athletes to victory on the eve of the 2008 State Championship. Ultimately, I felt most comfortable with a quote less about inspiration to win and more about motivation to work.

I used my favorite running quote, the statement from Tanzanian marathoner Juma Ikaanga: “The will to win means nothing without the will to prepare.” Ikaanga, a self-prescribed masochist who ran well over one hundred miles a week and put his body through the gauntlet for the goal of winning, gets down to the essence of what winning is: it is the work. The quote seemed to fit the moment because my young runners needed to hear one thing, and that was that they had done the work and they were ready. Okay, those are two things, but they go hand in hand.

If work is what matters most, then winning is the side effect more than the end-result. Work is not a sacrifice. If work is a sacrifice, then there must be something you would rather be doing. And if that is the case, then winning must not be worth doing either. You have to want to do both.

The 2008 season was about becoming the best by working consistently hard on a daily basis. I do not pretend they were perfect. There were some days they did not give 100%. There were some days they whined because they were tired and sore and it was 100 degrees. There were half-hearted long runs, and sorry excuses during interval workouts. They are not professional athletes, after all. School, family, and social life (not necessarily in that order) all competes for time with their athletic life. Still, I felt like they believed in the program, the philosophy, and the process behind success. When they considered if they really wanted it, they were willing to prepare.

Thus, on the night before State, I reminded them how hard they had worked. I recalled hot, steamy long runs in August and humid, torturous surge runs in September. I recounted tales of our success, but always I focused on the progress - the steady, workmanlike, patient improvement every member of the team experienced. In that meeting, something that could have been the overwhelming, leg-numbing, butterfly-incubating event other teams would face became something so much smaller than the previous sixteen weeks of daily work and progress. That is why I was confidently able to tell them, “Guys, whether you win or lose, I’ll be proud of you.”

Of course, I wanted the victory, and no assurance of love and pride could belie that fact to my runners. Our team had not won the State title since 1994, the year some of them were born. We had been State runners-up three times in four years but that was long ago, and every year since then felt like a rebuilding year instead of a year when we could take it to the next level. The difference this year was two-fold: we were relative nobodies (fourth in 2007), and the charismatic seniors with a sophisticated, Romantic sense of Carpe Diem, inspired the core group of varsity runners to train harder. In June, when unofficial captain-led practices began, they did not know we would become a dark horse contender for the State title in November.

Before we boarded the bus the day before for the four-hour drive to Natchitoches, I gathered them in the gym where the State Champion banners hang from the rafters. I pointed to the blue banner that signifies the 1994 season of glory. I told them we would return home, remove the banner from its hooks, and stitch 2008 on it right next to 1994. My runners did not bat an eye.

I felt confident doing that with them not because I was cocky. Far from it. We would have to beat the prior year’s champion and also another team that had beaten us soundly four times previously that season, including the District Championship where they had stepped on our necks and convincingly destroyed us. I was confident that my team was prepared, and they needed to know that before we even hopped on the bus. They knew I would not tell them they were prepared if they were not. I do not give false hope. Running is not about mind games and parlor tricks. It is about the work.

My boys had learned that you have to want to work and you have to want to hurt if you really want to win. But within running, as in life, there is also the painful lesson that winning is not guaranteed no matter how hard you work.

I had seen it or experienced it firsthand many times before. At the post-race ceremony at the 2009 Crescent City Classic, the announcer brought the top three overall females on stage to receive their trophies. The 2008 winner, Genuviva Kigen, had placed second to Lineth Chepkurui by less than three seconds in a sprint finish. As Kigen took the stage, the announcer asked her, “Genuviva, why did you lose today?” She looked out on the crowd in and spoke slowly but clearly, “We are athletes. It is what we do. We win. We lose.” How concise is that? That is why we run races, why we had to go to State and see which we would do this day: win or lose.

When I heard her say that, I thought of the opposite of her mentality. Vince Lombardi is quoted, ad nauseam, saying, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” As a credo of machismo, it serves as a war cry to other, major team sports. It hangs on cinderblock gym walls, worshiped like a modern-day shrine to Nike Athena. I do not have a problem with winning or wanting to win, but it is the hard work that makes one a good person, not the winning. Lots of men and women work hard their entire lives and never win anything, but they earn a sense of pride and accomplishment nonetheless. Winning a trophy does not make one successful, and the trophy is only worth something if it took hard work to win.